Comcast sold your soul

[Guest hilaryfan80]

Okay, I will admit that the title is a little bit of clickbait, but the topic is very serious: the Trump administration has just voted on a bill that will repeal a lot of protections on your privacy. With the new bill in effect, your ISP (e.g. Comcast, Spectrum, and your phone provider) can, and will, collect information on everything that you do on the Internet and sell that information to advertisers to make a quick buck.

What does this mean for you? Basically, your right to free speech is now a quick buck for big companies. It's just as bad as Mr. Krabs selling SpongeBob's soul for 62 cents.

"But I have nothing to hide!" Please read this quote:

Quote

"Over the last 16 months, as I've debated this issue around the world, every single time somebody has said to me, 'I don't really worry about invasions of privacy because I don't have anything to hide.' I always say the same thing to them. I get out a pen, I write down my email address. I say, 'Here's my email address. What I want you to do when you get home is email me the passwords to all of your email accounts, not just the nice, respectable work one in your name, but all of them, because I want to be able to just troll through what it is you're doing online, read what I want to read and publish whatever I find interesting. After all, if you're not a bad person, if you're doing nothing wrong, you should have nothing to hide.' Not a single person has taken me up on that offer." -Glenn Greenwald in Why privacy matters - TED Talk

 

Now, more than ever, privacy tools are needed on the Internet. The best option is to get a VPN. Using a VPN will effectively make it to where Comcast or Spectrum cannot collect information on you because your internet is coming from somewhere else. Personally, I am using Private Internet Access, which is $40 for an entire year of service or $6 for monthly, and it gives access to up to 5 devices (I have it on my Mac and iPhone). If you do not wish to pay for a VPN, the Opera browser offers a great free VPN service within their browser that does not track or log your browsing (and Opera now uses Chrome so all your Chrome stuff still works!). You can really get any VPN service, but make 100% sure that the VPN that you select is a "no log" VPN - that is, they do not collect information on you. The two that I've mentioned are both no log VPNs.

There's another free VPN that I posted down in the topic if you're interested, and it works with Chrome and Firefox.

The next best option is to get privacy extensions/add-ons for your browser. Ideally, you'll want the big three privacy extensions: Ghostery, an adblocker (uBlock Origin is great!), and HTTPS Everywhere.

This is a great resource: https://privacytoolsio.github.io/privacytools.io/

Happy privacy!

Edited April 6, 2017 by hilaryfan80

[kylie]

stan talent, stan T-ARA 

[Rebel the Wolfgirl]

Will they sell our souls for rock and roll?  

[Guest hilaryfan80]

Just now, Renegade the Unicorn said:

Will they sell our souls for rock and roll?  

I think they would sell our souls for anything just because it's legal, tbh.

[Guest hilaryfan80]

I can recommend DotVPN for those who want to use Firefox or Chrome.

https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/dotvpn/

https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/dotvpn-—-a-better-way-to/kpiecbcckbofpmkkkdibbllpinceiihk

[sbl]

Canadian passing by, hearing about how your country is going into the toilet